What you'll learn

Explaining why a number missed its target is harder than reporting the miss, and a confident-sounding explanation is not the same as a verified one. In this course, Analyze Performance with Business Analytics, you’ll gain the ability to investigate a business performance change and support the explanation with evidence. First, you’ll explore how to read a KPI against targets, budgets, benchmarks, and prior periods, and how to calculate variance, rates of change, and contribution to the overall result. Next, you’ll discover how to separate trend and seasonality from genuine outliers, and how to segment and drill into a result by region, category, channel, customer, and business unit. Finally, you’ll learn how to locate a change in a BI report, rank the segments behind it, tell potential drivers apart from confirmed causes, and verify an AI-generated summary before it reaches a decision-maker. When you’re finished with this course, you’ll have the skills and knowledge of business performance analysis needed to explain what changed, and to say honestly how much of that explanation the data actually supports.